PART XXI: ANCONA (9/27)

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We went to Ancona to learn about the archaeology of the city, the region, and Italy generally. Ancona celebrated its 2,400th Anniversary this year although this is just based on the first documented mention of the city. Actually, Ancona and its surrounding area has been an important component of about a dozen civilizations over the past four millennia.

The history of the city, like many old cities in Europe, can be explored much like geology in that it is preserved in layers beneath the modern streets and buildings. This site was a Greek temple, a Roman Forum, a nunnery, and a prison.

The Ancona Cathedral, which is the seat of the Archbishop of Ancona, is a converted Byzantine Paleo-Christian church with Gothic architectural elements. It was built on top of the Greek acropolis that was built on the hill overlooking the harbor in the 3rd Century BC.

The view of the harbor from the Ancona Cathedral. The Jadrolinija boat on the left, called Marko Polo, is the ferry we will be taking to Hvar.

Each city's main square where trade happened had these on the wall in order to standardize length measurements. Pie is foot and braccio is arm.

A beautiful piazza with another old church with a renovated facade.

The little stand with the green awning on the right served us an incredible variety of very tasty sea food-gastropods, mollusks, bivalves. Unfortunately I don't remember their names.

A neat fountain near our lunch spot.

One of the main goals of the trip was to see this archaeological museum.

One of Sandro's old friends works in this lab where about six square kilometers of hillside overlooking the sea north of Ancona are monitored in order to warn the people who live there if a landslide is happening. The lab and monitoring stations were set up after a huge landslide in 1982 devastated the area's buildings and the major road and train line into the city itself.

Here is a building that has shifted and sunk even further ever since the 1982 landslide. People are no longer allowed to build on the landslide but some people live in the few buildings that survived.

One of the landslide monitoring stations.

The view of Ancona from the landslide area just north of the city.